I can’t remember what I was going to write about in today’s tweets post. I knew at 2am, but went back to sleep for a while and I’ve forgotten. Further, if I’d gotten up to write it down, I might have noticed that I’d left the oven on! Instead it was 9am before I realized!

So instead I’ll write about the selection of Roy Moore as the Republican candidate for the vacant Alabama Senate seat. Until Trump thought Jeff Sessions would make a good Attorney-General, he’d held the seat since 1996. He and Richard Shelby have held the state for the GOP since then, and there’s a strong chance Moore will continue that trend.

The Democratic candidate for the seat, US Attorney Doug Jones, is eminently capable and electable. Republicans choice of Moore to run against him may not go well. Although Trump won the state by more than 28 points in last year’s election and the state has been red for over twenty years, there’s a lot not to like about Moore.

If the GOP loses this seat, it will be because of Moore. In the primary the so-called establishment led by Senate leader Mitch McConnell put their backing and millions of dollars behind caretaker senator Luther Strange. They even got Trump to lead a rally for him. They knew that when it came to the election, Strange would be a much tougher candidate to beat. When it comes to a general election, Moore may be too conservative, even for Alabama.

However, people like Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Ben Carson and Nigel Farage all support Moore. Moore’s an Evangelical and Dominionist, and the right-wing of the GOP love him. Now that Moore has won the primary, Trump is backing him too. He’s even deleted a few of his old tweets supporting Strange.

It will be hard to get anyone other than Evangelicals to vote for Moore. But, there are a lot of them in Alabama. According to Pew Research, 49% of people in Alabama are Evangelicals.

When it comes to religion at least, Alabama is a very conservative state. 77% say religion is “very important” to them, and another 13% say it’s “somewhat important.” More than half the population attends church at least once a week, and 73% pray at least daily. 51% of people in Alabama say that the “Word of God should be taken literally” and most believe in heaven (84%) and hell (72%). The majority also oppose abortion (58%), homosexuality (52%), and same-sex marriage (57%). 49% think humans have always existed in their current form, and of the 44% who accept evolution, 26% think we evolved due to God’s design. Only 18% think evolution was by “natural processes.”

Moore lost his job as chief justice of that state’s supreme court twice; on both occasions, he lost it by flaunting the authority of the federal court system …

The first time was because of his refusal to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the State Capitol, and the second was for refusing to allow same-sex marriage following the US Supreme Court ruling that is was constitutional.

So if he wins, there will be a US senator who refuses to follow the law and he makes no apology for that. He firmly believes his god’s law comes before any man-made law. He has publicly said on multiple occasions that (his) God must be brought back into government. He believes that (his) God is the “basic source of our morality.”

Political Tweets

I don’t get how USians know this, but enough still gave him their vote to get him into the most powerful job in the world. (Though, to be fair, he’s abrogated a lot of that power since taking over!)
(Via Ann German.)

Human Rights Tweets

Two young women make a video in support of the White Wednesday campaign in Iran after their first time joining the weekly march.

For those who don’t know, women in Iran have to wear certain clothes in public, including a hijab (scarf) covering their hair. Gangs of men are employed by the government to drive around looking for women who are not properly covered.

The White Wednesday campaigners want to have the choice whether or not to wear a hijab, and ultimately other clothing as well. To show they are part of the campaign, they wear a white hijab on Wednesdays.

There was no restriction on women’s clothing before the Iranian Revolution in 1978-9.

This is very cool! I’d love to do this to a tree at my place, but someone else would have to do the work. I always put up lots of lights and have a tree at Christmas because the kids (nieces and nephews) love it, and I see cars with kids in the back stopping to look.

13 Responses to “28 Sep 2017: Daily Homily (Roy Moore) and Tweets”

CNBC reported the “10 worst states to live inv2017”. Guess who “won” 1st? And below is why. The other nine states were all southern states as well (except Oklahoma). The states with the highest population of religious people are the worst to live in- no surprise there.

1. ALABAMA Sweet home? Not if you are over 50, a minority, gay or transgender and you are concerned about discrimination. Alabama is one of only five states with no statewide legal protections for those groups, making it one of America’s least inclusive states. It is also one of America’s least healthy states, with the nation’s third-highest rate of premature deaths. On a positive note, the skies are blue and the governor’s true.

Doesn’t surprise me at all. Another of the stats at the Pew link was the high number of people in Alabama who thought government should play a smaller part in people’s lives. In the US that always seems to have a high correlation with accepting a large amount of federal assistance (more than is paid in taxes), low income, high divorce and teenage pregnancy rates, and other negative social outcomes.

Interesting. So you’re saying there’s a correlation between low income tax revenues – and low income? Between low income and “negative social outcomes”? Between negative social outcomes and income redistribution? Isn’t that all tautological? (And BTW, if we still have “negative social outcomes” after decades of massive income redistribution, wouldn’t the rational conclusion be that income redistribution is counterproductive?)

But I really hate to see you resort to that leftist canard about some states supposedly “accepting” a disproporionate share of federal “assistance”. Doesn’t hold water.

First, the phenomenon is more accurately described as a disparity on the revenue side, not spending. No federal income tax revenue comes from low-income people, while most comes from a relatively small population that’s heavily concentrated in a few enclaves in a few blue states. The so-called “progressive” structure of the income tax, combined with the geographic concentration of income, means that the states with all the rich people will always be net “donors” compared with everybody else — even if spending were uniformly distributed.

Then another trick beloved of lefties: Talk about total outlays as if the whole ball of wax amounts to welfare — effectively lumping nuclear subs with food stamps. But if you look at actual social assistance and direct grants, and exclude procurement contracts, salaries and retirement, then you find that Alabama actually receives fewer dollars per capita than big blue states:

Quite honestly, I can’t be bothered checking how accurate all this is. I think the figures are probably correct but it doesn’t change the fact that those who complain about big government are the ones who take the most from it.

Just like teenage pregnancy rates, abortion rates, STD rates, and divorce rates are higher in the Bible Belt states.

And people are better off than they were in the days before there was any social spending. Just check out the history books for what happened to people who lost their jobs or their homes in 1850.

And the other comment of yours I need to respond to about looking after a bad Christian before a good atheist. How about all the looking after that Donald Trump gets from all those Evangelicals, though imo the leadership at least of the Evangelicals are bad Christians themselves.

“those who complain about big government are the ones who take the most from it”

But that’s just it — it’s not a fact. It’s an unsubstantiated insinuation that does not hold up to scrutiny, as I commented above.

Of course living standards are higher in every respect today than a year ago, a decade ago, and a century ago. That’s thanks to the awesome power of free enterprise — no thanks to politics, and certainly not socialist politics.

On your last point, two things: [1] Recall that your original comment impugned private charities and accused them of wholesale religious discrimination. That’s a reprehensible charge that I call on you to either substantiate or retract. And it has nothing to do with Trump in any event. [2] Evangelicalism is not my thing, but I’ve never heard of most of the characters you have banged on about, and I am very skeptical that any knowledgeable unbiased* observer would describe any of them as “leaders” of that movement. (*For the record that excludes haters and ax-grinders like PFAW).

But it is about more social fairness – that’s the point. People getting paid fair wages for their work, getting holiday pay, sick pay etc, children not working, all children getting an education, police forces, fire brigades, even government military. All those things are socialist type ideas. We are all on a spectrum. Somewhere like China has a lot more socialist things than the US, but both have them. Communism wouldn’t work, extreme socialism doesn’t work, especially when you have really bad management like in Venezuela, but a certain amount done well is good, and better for a country than not having it.

It is better, for example, for a business to be able to pick employees from a pool of educated, healthy people, for it to be easy for them to get to work because of good roads and transport etc. It is better for people to pay a small part of their wages towards things like police and fireman and we all contribute to those things even of we don’t use them because it’s better for society and it makes the world a nicer place to be.

Once you get beyond the armed forces and the police, it’s not at all obvious that political entanglement is necessary, much less preferable. For instance, over two-thirds of American firefighters are privately-organized volunteers. On the other hand, our government-monopoply school systems are a disaster.

As importantly, what’s “better for society”, or what “makes the world a nicer place” are matters of judgement and conscience, matters about which people hold diametrically opposed views. If the goal is fairness, the fairest thing is to keep politics out of it and let people be.

“Letting people be” and only having the military and the police means a return to a feudal system, though at least they had law courts. That means almost no one, especially women, being able to better themselves, starting with getting a good education. You can’t afford it, your kids not only don’t get educated, they have to go out to work from an early age. People are exploited. There’s no standard weights and measures, no currency as a means of exchange, no regulations requiring cleanliness in food production, no one to build or maintain roads and bridges let alone to a certain standard etc etc etc. If that’s what you like, there are still countries run like that and I suggest you go and live in one instead of your safe, comfortable, US existence that you clearly don’t appreciate. But hey, you won’t have to pay much tax.

Alabama didn’t “produce” any of those people. They happen to have been born there, that’s it; no great achievement being born, or becoming pregnant for that matter. Then “they” did something with their lives, but that has nothing to do with Alabama (except Harper Lee, since she used the culture/geography as an artistic backdrop). All 50 states could assemble such a list. Either way, pecan groves and Mercedes-Benz plants aside, you couldn’t pay me to live in a state rife with theocratic leanings and an unenlightened entrenched republican government.